Opinion | How the 1972 Summit Series changed the way Canada looks at hockey

It will be 50 years this weekend that Canada woke up to a vision of itself it hadn’t previously contemplated. The morning after Game 1 of the Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union brought with it a crisis of belief — or rather, in some minds, disbelief.

Certainly Ken Dryden wasn’t particularly eager to acknowledge he’d been party to the events of the previous evening at the Montreal Forum. As Canada’s goaltender in that transformational moment, Dryden had watched no less than seven Soviet shots whiz by him in a 7-3 defeat that was less a Canadian loss than a national humbling. And as Dryden laid in bed at the old Sutton Place Hotel in Toronto, where Team Canada had flown in the game’s discombobulated wake, the goaltender saw and heard no evidence that the world as he knew it had been turned upside down. It was a Sunday, and the city had no Sunday newspapers in those days. There were no all-sports TV or radio stations offering blow-by-blow post-mortems of the carnage.

“There was nothing around me, anywhere, that said that (Game 1) had ever happened,” Dryden writes in his new book, “The Series.” “And until I left that room, it might not have. So I stayed in the room.”

Some facts aren’t fun to face. And even 50 years later it’s easy enough to see why. The whole point of the epochal eight-game series, after all, had been for Canada to announce its resounding dominance in the sport it brought to prominence. Yes, the Soviets had won nine straight world hockey championships to go with three straight Olympic golds heading into the event. But in Canada the Soviet domination of the world stage was seen as an aggravating illusion hung on the technicality of “amateur” status. Canada’s best players made up the bulk of the NHL, undeniably the world’s best league, but they were professionals who were ineligible for international competition at the time. The Soviet Union’s top players, meanwhile, skated circles around the global competition because they were designated as “amateurs” despite being paid to play hockey as a full-time job.

“We couldn’t win the world championships. We couldn’t win the Olympics. And yet we were the best,” Dryden said in a recent interview. “And we needed to find a way of demonstrating we were the best.”

Before the Summit Series began, there was consensus on this side of the Iron Curtain that Canada would restore a rightful balance to the universe by convincingly trouncing the Soviets. Call it overconfidence. Call it arrogance. Or maybe blame it on ignorance, since it was a pair of Canadian bird dogs, both employees of the Maple Leafs, whose scouting report was later lampooned for sketching the Soviets as a hapless squad with sievelike goaltending — never mind that they’d unknowingly scouted Russian netminder Vladislav Tretiak, the future Hockey Hall of Famer, in the groggy wake of Tretiak’s bachelor party.

“Geez! No wonder the Maple Leafs end up in last place all the time,” Team Canada forward Phil Esposito would later say.

But after the Soviets emerged from Game 1 in Montreal with that towering victory, let’s just say that Canada’s national view of the game had never before been so abruptly and radically readjusted. Before the loss, Canada revelled in its assumed supremacy. After it, Canada knew it was in trouble.

Certainly part of the problem was that Canada had underestimated its opponent. But it wasn’t only that. The Soviets, never mind the scouting report, were undeniably excellent, not only better conditioned than their NHL rivals, many of whom had come fresh from swilling cottage-country beers, but unfurling a more skilled and creative game than most of what Canada had to offer, favouring east-west puck possession over north-south dump and chase.

And even though Canada would go on to win the series, with Paul Henderson’s Game 8 series clincher taking its place as the country’s most important sporting moment of its century, things would never be the same again. Fifty years ago this month, there was a lot going on in the pages of this newspaper. There was a federal election campaign underway, with incumbent prime minister Pierre Trudeau occasionally trotting out a baby son named Justin in an attempt to buff the faded shine of Trudeaumania. There was a Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, where the seven gold medals won by U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz would soon enough be cruelly overshadowed by the pall of a massacre that would kill 11 Israeli coaches and athletes.

But for the 27 days that spanned those eight hockey games, Canada gave its mostly undivided attention to this battle of opposites. This was capitalists versus communists in the thick of the Cold War, with the relative beauty in the eye of the beholder. Canadians saw the Russians as emotionless robots in tattered gear and alien helmets, even if they came to acknowledge the merits of their quick-passing, ever-regrouping style. Russians saw Canadians as thugs, but couldn’t help but admire the passion that fuelled the aggression.

When the puck was dropped, the story goes that life in Canada largely stopped. TVs were rolled into school classrooms. When Game 8 was played in Moscow, it’s estimated that 16 million of Canada’s 22 million people were tuned in, never mind that the contest started at 1 p.m. Toronto time.

The series built legends. It would turn Phil Esposito from a Boston Bruins all-star to a Canadian icon, both for his copious goals and his post-Game 4 admonishment of Vancouver’s boos. It would elevate Henderson from Leafs forward to national hero. And as the first extended attempt at best-on-best international hockey, it would spawn a hankering in hockey fans that, even today, never seems to be sufficiently sated.

Certainly it was a roller-coaster of emotion. Dryden once called the reaction to Canada’s loss in Game 1 a national “spasm of self-hatred.” And ever since, Canada has experienced plenty of descendant moments of collective hand-wringing about a national developmental system that, depending on the decade, has been made to look outmoded by rivals in Europe and the United States.

It was a series of hypotheticals, too. Canada would have won far more easily if its two best Bobbys — Orr and Hull — would have been available for action. Alas, Orr was out with knee trouble, and Hull was denied a place on the team on account of his decision to join the Winnipeg Jets of the rebel World Hockey Association, never mind that Pierre Trudeau himself advocated for Hull’s inclusion on the roster. Canada, the Russians might counter, never would have prevailed if not for another Bobby — a Broad Street Bully named Clarke — laying a Game 6 two-hander to the ankle of the best Soviet player of the moment, Valeri Kharlamov, whose effectiveness was nullified thereafter.

Then again, if the team that wants it more wins more often than not, there are members of Team Canada who have made the case that therein lied the difference.

“To me, it was war,” Esposito said in “Home Game,” the book by Ken Dryden and Roy MacGregor. “I’ve often wondered, like, I’ve never shot a deer. I’ve never shot anything in my life. I’ve never hunted. I’m just not the type of guy. But there’s no doubt in my mind that I think I would have killed to win. And that scares me … I would have killed them to win. I would have done anything to win. Absolutely anything.”

As much as it was difficult to comprehend in the blurry-eyed aftermath of Game 1, something about the way Canada looks at hockey changed 50 years ago this month. A country went from assuming it was the sport’s undisputed ruler to knowing it had a more-than-worthy rival. Still, without the birthright of supremacy, Canada’s blessing and its curse, you can make a case there would have been no victory. As Dryden argues in “The Series,” Team Canada prevailed because every player on the roster grew up believing that, while the Soviets were perennial world champions, Canada was the best.

“When something is deep inside you like that, you go deeper to protect it,” Dryden writes. “You do more because more is needed, and when that isn’t enough, you go deeper still, to where you’ve never been, to where you find another you that you didn’t know was inside you … Why did we win? Because it was personal.”

A half a century on, the axis has shifted, the world has changed, but the rawness of that feeling still translates.

More from ‘Summit Series At 50’:

Summit Series Game 1: Soviets embarrass Canadians on home ice — and demonstrate how the game should be played

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